Dictionary of Literary Biography on William Godwin

It was William Godwin's fate to rise suddenly to fame as a radical philosopher at the end of the eighteenth century and then to plunge almost as rapidly into opprobrium and neglect. Brought to public attention and approval by his daring concepts of individual freedom and the power of reason at the time of the French Revolution, he was vilified for his radical ideas after 1800, when Englishmen had become disillusioned by events in France beginning with the Terror of 1793-1794. Godwin was a writer of tremendous scope; in addition to his monumental treatise on political justice, he wrote letters, novels, plays, essays, children's books, textbooks, and legal arguments. He worked successfully with other writers in a variety of ways, editing the works of his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, and revising books for his daughter, Mary Shelley. He made radical revisions in later editions of his own works as his...